In December 2008 both the UK Ministry of Defence and the US Marine Corps Systems Command announced they were seeking suppliers of ballistic protective spectacles and goggles for issue to troops deploying on combat operations. Incredibly, on average around one in six of those injured on the battlefield suffer eye injuries, frequently so severe in nature that the soldier cannot return to frontline duties, yet mostly these could be prevented by the wearing of relatively inexpensive spectacles or goggles. Oh, and as for my mate, he was rejected right at the start because he had flat feet so he ended up working with newfangled computers instead!īattlefield Protection: Every few days, or so it seemed, battlefield fatalities in Afghanistan hit the news back in 2009, but it was seldom publicised that for every soldier killed in action several others were taken off the battlefield with life-threatening or life-changing injuries. It would be some time before the deterioration in my eyesight was so bad that I had to start permanently wearing spectacles, but unfortunately for me the RAF doctor who examined my eyes spotted the signs of future problems and put the block on my dreams of seeing the world as an RAF officer. Library image from 2004 of a US Army optician at work in Iraq ~ in 2003/4 a quarter of all wounded US soldiers evacuated from Iraq or Afghanistan were suffering from eye injuries Ī quick trip by ambulance to the local eye infirmary resulted and the surgeon deftly removed the offending item, seemingly without it having caused major damage, but over the next few months things started to go wrong. I had been wearing the right safety gear, and indeed my training school instructor was standing alongside me at the time so I had no option but to do so, yet a tiny little red hot sliver of metal had still found the one path through to my eye. A few months before, while on an engineering workshop course, a freak accident had seen a tiny sliver of hot metal chipped from a weld enter my eye. To cut a long story short, my hoped for career in the RAF petered out shortly after my first in-depth sight test, when it was discovered that my vision in one eye was actually below par. However, as an avid reader from boyhood, the memoirs of Douglas Bader, Bob Stanford-Tuck and their Battle of Britain colleagues had given me a glamorous perception of the RAF, so when my best mate suggested it really was about time for us to knuckle down, find adventurous jobs and see the world, it was to the RAF Careers Office in our native Glasgow that we headed. My father served as a sailor in the Far East during the WWII, but as he did not talk of his exploits and as I have never been much of a swimmer the Navy held no real appeal. I suppose I could have joined the Commandos, but the tale that a close family friend told of stepping off a landing craft into neck deep water on D-Day and then seeing his mates die around him as that tough and wiry little Glaswegian struggled ashore under fire, was a bit off-putting. ¤ When I was in my teens I had a romantic dream of joining the Royal Air Force and seeing the world. Back in 2009 I penned the following article which is possibly now worth another outing, albeit slightly reworked and updated for 2022:. This really is rather stupid, as a soldier’s eyes are not only the most fragile and vulnerable part of the body, but sight is often the most necessary of all the senses if one is to survive on the battlefield. I then looked back through our library of images of British troops taken in the field over the last few years on both training exercises and operational deployments, as well as through publicly accessible UK MoD defence imagery archives and realised that since the end of Operations TELIC and HERRICK, with the exception of the Operation NEWCOMBE deployment in Mali, the wearing of eyepro again appears to be unfashionable. British soldiers deployed on Operation CABRIT in Estonia clearing an abandoned building on a field training exercise in 2019 ~ despite the hazards they are not wearing eyepro
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |